Art exhibition listings

Andrea Damp, Peterchens Mondfahrt (2012).

Photo Courtesy of Aki Gallery

German Contemporary Art: Facing Reality 2012, Eye On Andrea Damp, Michael Bach and Wolfgang Ellenrieder is a group show of figurative painting by three German artists. Damp’s work features children wandering through bucolic, and somewhat psychedelic, landscapes rendered in vivid colors. Bach’s realistic city panoramas offer a lyrical tenderness to urban settings, while Ellenrieder uses everyday objects to explore the construction and representation of image.

According to Project Fulfill Art Space, LuxuryLogico (豪華朗機工) is a “super hybrid artist group” that comprises Llunc Lin (林昆穎), Chen Chih-chien (陳志建), Chang Keng-hau (張耿豪) and Chang Geng-hwa (張耿華). In Fruition — Fulfill Arts (福 — Fulfill Arts), the new media artists pay tribute to nine of their Taiwanese contemporaries by creating new works that were inspired by, include or document their artistic heroes, such as sculptor Tu Wei-cheng (涂維政) and digital photographer Hung Tung-lu (洪東祿). The nine works on display include video and sound installation, puzzles, etchings and paintings. On May 5 at 5pm, the collective will begin a 24-hour “one-day performance,” a salute to performance artist Hsieh Teh-ching (謝德慶).

The portraits of Japanese-born, US-based artist Yuhi Hasegawa possess an almost tribal quality: Think the neo-expressionist graffiti of Jean-Michel Basquiat informed by a more refined quality that owes a debt to African masks. In Night Carnival, Hasegawa continues his exploration of primitive human emotions using solid coloring with several undercoats, which lend his works an appealing luminescence. Working from neither photographs nor sketches, his output is a spontaneous expression of the human form.

The complementary and inseparable relationship of a glaze’s color and the object on which it’s placed underlies Glaze-coating (釉彩衣), a solo show of ceramics by Shih Chi-yao (施繼堯). Shih’s abstract sculptures possess a delicate linearity of shape and pattern that produces dramatic tension.

One has to wonder what Holland-based German artist Isabelle Wenzel thinks about the modern businesswoman. In Posing, a solo show of six large-scale staged photographs, one shot depicts a woman standing on her hands in what appears to be an office strewn full of documents, her dress pulled over her head and torso with only her sheer nylons and ass exposed. Wenzel has stated in interviews that she explores gender roles in the business place, the dress code and settings both alienating and dehumanizing. Think Christina Hendricks in the television series Mad Men.